The world today is driven by information. Much of this information is accessible electronically, whether over the Internet or through a private intranet. People typically access desired information by connecting to the Internet or intranet using wired network connections or short-ranged wireless protocols, such as wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi), IEEE 802.11, BLUETOOTH™, or the like. These short-ranged wireless protocols allow for high bandwidth connectivity, which lends to their popularity. However, these access methods are limited to the availability of the wired or wireless access point.
Attempts have been made in the past to implement information access over the wireless telephone networks. However, because these networks are designed mostly for voice traffic, the available bandwidth capability for data transmission is far less than the broadband capabilities of the short-ranged wireless protocols. As such, these previous phone-based information systems typically provided only textual information or some kind of Web browsing at very high latency.
One of the first technologies used to pass information to a wireless phone user was Small Message Service (SMS). SMS is a text service that enables short messages of generally no more than 140-160 characters in length to be sent and transmitted from a mobile phone. In such a system, a user would typically log onto a particular Web site to sign up and enter information preferences or sign up through some interactive telecommunications service to receive periodic small messages of interest. For example, a user would call into a service provider's interactive voice response (IVR) system and sign up to receive sports scores for their favorite basketball team or teams. Thereafter, when the service provider compiles the scores for the user-requested team or teams, a short text message would be forwarded to the user's mobile phone, or whatever other mobile device that was designated. The SMS information system, thus, utilizes a broadcast paradigm to deliver information.
The information presented by the service provider or SMS server is gathered and formed into the individual messages for the user. Each user interacts with an out of band system to enter the user's data preferences. Through either a Web site or interactive voice response (IVR) system, the user enters his or her preferences. Those preferences are then communicated to the service provider or SMS server. The preferences are typically entered into a database and associated with the particular user. Therefore, not only is the amount and format of data limited, user preferences are entered out of band. This out of band preference entry system many times delays delivery of the newly requested or changed information while the preferences are communicated to the service provider or SMS server.
The next step in wireless information technology was largely driven by the explosion of the World Wide Web (WWW). Web browsers, which are so prevalent in everyday life, were basically scaled down for use in mobile phones. These microbrowsers generally provide browser-like functionality to the mobile phone, albeit at a much reduced level. Due to the typically limited memory and processing power of mobile phones, early microbrowsers used Wireless Access Protocol (WAP) and Wireless Mark-up Language (WML), which are protocols that attempt to mimic the full-scale standards of hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and hypertext mark-up language (HTML). More recently, however, as the ability of the mobile phones has increased, some microbrowsers actually use HTML browsers.
The paradigm of the microbrowser operates in much the same manner as a full-scaled Web browser. A Web page, which may be a WAP page or an HTML page, is downloaded from a Web server, again, which could be a WAP server or HTTP server, to a user's phone. Either by activating standard navigation elements or hypertext links, subsequent Web pages are downloaded to the microbrowser for the user to view. The user's interaction is similar to that in a Web browser except without the graphical richness, which has been either removed or drastically reduced in order to accommodate the limited bandwidth availability in mobile telecommunication systems for data traffic. The user may access typical browser navigational elements, such as Back or Forward or, through some substantial key-strokes, enter a Web site address or Uniform Resource Locator (URL). Because of the device and bandwidth restrictions in the mobile telecommunication area, the main noticeable difference between the microbrowser paradigm and the Web browser is that the majority of information on the “micro” pages is textual.
In application, the microbrowser offers a greater variety and reach of information than the SMS systems. Moreover, the user is afforded a greater interactivity by being allowed to “surf” to any desired and compatible Web site or Web page. However, a user interacts with pre-existing Web sites or Web pages, or some kind of server page, such as SUN MICROSYSTEM INC.'s JAVA™ SERVER PAGE (JSP™), MICROSOFT CORPORATION's ACTIVE SERVER PAGE (ASP™), and the like, that may generate the Web site or Web page dynamically as the user navigates to the page. Therefore, an information system that utilizes an Internet or WWW browsing paradigm, does so with pre-existing sites, pages, or server pages. The user typically has no ability to enter preferences as to what kind of data to receive when browsing to the compatible Web pages or Web sites.
Moreover, in operation, the user experience could generally be described as click-and-wait, rather than click-and-view. Because a relatively large amount of data is transmitted over the wireless network to the phone for each Web page, a large latency existed between the page request and the final download and display of the page. This large latency period experienced by most wireless phone Internet users limited the appeal of the microbrowser system. Furthermore, because many service providers placed a per minute usage charge on accessing the Internet over a mobile phone, the long latency generally meant higher costs for a service where the waiting time could exceed the actual information interaction time.
Several ideas followed the microbrowser attempting to address the problems it exhibited. One solution that addressed the long latency periods and lack of graphical experience was the stored-page approach. An example of this type of service is iAnywhere Solutions, Inc.'s AVANTGO™. The AVANTGO™ system includes software on the user's device which allows the user to select particular Web sites or Web pages to store on the user's device. While the user's device is physically connected to the Internet, either using a wired or wireless connection, the AVANTGO™ software accesses the user's preferred Web sites and stores those HTML pages directly on the user's device memory. The user is then able to “surf” through the saved Web pages even after disconnecting the device from the Internet connection. Because the Web pages are stored directly on the mobile device, almost no latency exists when the user is viewing the various, saved Web pages. However, the trade-off made for the low latency is the fact that the data being viewed is no longer dynamic Web content. Moreover, as with the regular browser paradigm, the user has no means for customizing the information other than merely selecting a particular Web site or Web page.
The latest improvement, which was applied to the microbrowser paradigm, is generally referred to as a push browser service. Instead of waiting for a user to request a particular Web page, the push browser is proactively sent an HTML or WML page from the server. Therefore, when a user accesses the microbrowser, at least some content is already resident on the device, which initially reduces the latency. The user's interaction remains the same as the regular microbrowser, which basically mimics the user interaction of Web browsers without the rich graphics. The limitation to the push browser is that only a limited number of HTML/WML pages are stored. Once the user navigates or browses through all of the stored pages, the advantages achieved by the push system are gone. Without the stored pages, new pages are generally downloaded from the Web server on request of the user, which results in the long latency periods experienced in the normal microbrowsers.
An addition to the push technology was attempted in POINTCAST INC.'s POINTCAST™ system. The POINTCAST™ system was an information system for desktop computers that compiled and broadcast a wide variety of information items. Subscribers to this system received the broadcasts and stored the information items locally. By entering preferences to the user's local system, the client-side application of POINTCAST™ generally filtered the presentation of the information to the user based on those user preferences. The POINTCAST™ server would periodically update the information items, which the user could then view if those updates corresponded to the items the user preferred to view. However, the bandwidth requirements for transmitting and receiving all of the information typically clogged networks and caused long periods of network latency. While users experienced relatively low latency in accessing the information on the user's device, the user would typically experience a slow network clogged with a large amount of data being transmitted to every POINTCAST™ subscriber, much of which may not even be used.
The data for the POINTCAST™ system is compiled by the POINTCAST™ service provider. All of that data is broadcast to every subscriber. The subscriber typically has no direct interaction with the POINTCAST™ server to customize or even limit the data being transmitted to the user's device. The user, instead, enters data preferences locally on the user's device. The local preferences are then used as a filter of the large block of broadcast data stored on the user's device.